


Give Unto Him

by pyalgroundblz (acidtonguejenny)



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-30
Updated: 2013-07-30
Packaged: 2017-12-21 20:32:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/904594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acidtonguejenny/pseuds/pyalgroundblz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Waters of Life, our mourning hero lives up to his name and wanders the Wasteland. Charon follows, because that's what he does. </p><p>
  <i>As much as he didn't particularly care if they found the gecko or whatever it was, Charon itched to ask when they were going to actually, you know, get it.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Give Unto Him

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to keep the story as unspecific as possible, though there is a mention of eye color at one point :d
> 
>  ~~For those who prefer fem!LW, an alternate version can be found[here](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62263122/Revelationfemversion.pdf).~~ Unavailable due to author derp. Comment if anyone wants it.
> 
> Accompanying fanmix [here](http://pyalgroundblz.livejournal.com/53000.html).

Traveling the Capital Wasteland is a lot of creeping through the dark and dank, praying you have more ammunition than you think you do, and being hungry. Can't forget hunger. 

_Thirst_ , the Wanderer would add, and Charon imagines he's not wrong--at least so far as smoothskins are concerned. 

"Does me just fine," he says, lifting a bottle of dirty, murky water to his lips. The radiation is palatable and feels good on his tongue. He chortles at the Wanderer's nauseated expression. 

"Yuck," The Wanderer says, emphatic. 

At the moment they're scouring every standing structure (a broad specification indeed) they come across for edibles, because while the Wanderer doesn't turn his nose up at Wasteland game, he doesn't seem to take any nourishment from it either. Charon thinks he will always hesitate to serve him irradiated meat, no matter how lightly, after the Mole Rat Incident.

Charon himself has been feeling a little lean lately.

"Well. Lean _er_ ," the Wanderer corrects with a grin.

Charon grunts. 

The Wanderer has kept them out of the cities since the Jefferson Memorial was taken, and their packs are despairingly light. He seems to drift along, the version of him that Charon knows only appearing so long as there is something to shoot within range. 

Mourning, he figures. 

A ghoul is no stranger to loss. The Wanderer smacks of one still adjusting to it.

"Squishy vault-dweller," Charon says with affection.

A fire belonging to a raider camp flickers in the distance, and Charon can see their stacks of plunder from his position. Gotta be food there, right?

The Wanderer, rifle sights fixed on a raider, says, muffled, "What?"

"Nothing. You're getting too skinny."

"Working on that," comes the distracted reply. "How can I be squishy and skinny at the same time?"

The raider drops.

"Easy." Charon says, pinching the Wanderer's biceps. The muscle doesn't yield as much as he'd expected it to, but the layer of fat is still there. Thinning, but he considers the point made. 

The Wanderer looks at him, blinking and _really_ looking at him like he hasn't for weeks. 

Green eyes. Eye color still startles him, after so long with only ghouls for company. Most pairs of eyes he's known in recent decades are generally the same shade of cataract gray.

"What?" Charon says, though part of him warms at the glimpse of pre-Jefferson kid.

"Nothing, I guess," he says, ejecting the shell. "That's the first time you've touched me."

Was it? Months had passed since Charon's contract had changed hands and his new employer had turned out the be a decent sort of person. Hadn't he helped him limp to cover under a supermutant onslaught? Dragged his fool head out of the line of fire? 

He hadn't given the kid a hug when his dad bit it?

Fuck.

The last raider had been dropped as Charon thought, and the Wanderer stands, stretches, and jogs to the camp. 

Charon follows, naturally.

*

They linger around the camp for the rest of the night and through the next. He and the Wanderer drag the bodies over the nearest ridge for the dogs to have at and glut themselves on crumbling, powdery pre-war potatoes.

"How did they make food that lasted so long?" Charon says, tapping the last few flakes into his mouth.

"I know a ghoul who makes jet out of Sugar Bombs," the Wanderer says. "I'm not sure I'd call that food."

"It's still edible. After two hundred years."

The Wanderer shrugs. He leans back on his elbows and turns his face to the small fire they'd decided to risk. His sleeves are rolled up and the softer undershirt of his armor has gotten rucked up his belly somehow. His single gauntlet is on the ground by his hand, and Charon should really bitch about how stupid it is to strip off one's protective layers in the open Wasteland, but fuck if he can be bothered. 

The Wanderer has this thing about shedding clothing when he's relaxed, or attempting to achieve such a state. It must be a Vault thing. 

Charon draws the line at removing your boots, and snaps when the Wanderer leans down to do just that. The kid pouts, but it's play-acting and he tightens the laces again with a self-satisfied smirk. 

"I'll take first watch," Charon says as the Wanderer burrows down.

"Right."

He wakes him a few hours late to take over. 

They laze around the immediate area the next day after affirming that the there are no deathclaw nests over any of the hills. They lay out the tarp that usually goes beneath the bedroll they share, and spread out their haul.

"I know it's too much to expect chemheads to take care of their guns," the Wanderer grunts as a rusty part finally comes free. "But."

Charon waits. "But?" he asks.

The Wanderer shrugs, squinting down the bore. "Just 'but'."

Charon rolls his eyes.

They don't linger long over the guns, the parts they manage to salvage not worth the risks that go with field repair, but the Wanderer happily adds leather-wrapped steel plates to the back of his jacket, and Charon patches a number of thin spots on his own armor. Without removing it, he points out.

"Eh," says the Wanderer to this.

"How did you survive out here before hiring me?" Charon says, because really, the kid made it through the Capital Wasteland, D.C., and the Mall to Underworld on his own.

"Luck, probably."

The Wanderer is modest. He's a monster with a hunting rifle. A monster lacking Wasteland survival sense. Also, this is an old, familiar exchange.

Of all the food the raiders had gathered, there is none of the clear water the Wanderer loves. Plenty of cola, but a body doesn't run on flat soda.

The Wanderer groans and flops back theatrically when this is discovered. 

"And the reason why we can't stop somewhere and buy some is…?"

Charon looks up when the Wanderer doesn't respond after several moments. He's staring up into the sky in a way that probably isn't good on his delicate smoothskin eyes.

Charon calls his name.

The first week or so after the frantic flight for the Citadel, the Wanderer had led them determinedly westward, though after that he didn't seem to care what direction they ended up going so long as it wasn't southeast. 

Charon and his dirty water drinking self had little stake in Project Purity, but the importance of it to the smoothskins was obvious. Despite the fact that the Wanderer liked to treat the whole operation like a sibling he was at odds with, Charon knew it was something he believed in too. Perhaps less fervently, and less naively now that it had taken his father from him before his very eyes.

It was still something he wanted. He looked too hard at what bottles of good, Wanderer-approved water they had managed to dig up.

Yet the Wanderer had left the Citadel without venturing further into it than the courtyard, much less spoken with the Scribe he'd been advised to. Told to. The Wanderer killed supermutants by the slew, but he was still just a kid to them. One to send off on dangerous fetch jobs when his father's body was still fresh. Fucking Brotherhood. All the expectations, none of the respect.

Much as he didn't particularly care if they found the gecko or whatever it was the Rivet City doc had said they needed, Charon itched to ask when they were going to actually, you know, get it.

'Course, that might just be him peeling.

The Wanderer still doesn't answer, but he rolls his head to the side and that satisfies Charon that he's not somehow died in the last few minutes. 

He can't imagine the kid _not_ going for the G.E.C.K. Eventually. 

The only problem is, meanwhile, the Enclave is knocking around the Memorial, doing god knows what to all that delicate seeming equipment...

Charon is going to have to be the one to force the issue, he can feel it. He doesn't particularly want to be, but there isn’'t exactly anyone else to do it. In the unlikely event that the Wanderer encountered any Brotherhood before he came around, the one that raised the issue might very well have Charon to contend with. 

He's felt the days drag by, imagining the inside of the Memorial going to hell, the purifier being poked and prodded and clumsily dissected. 

They leave the campsite and promptly run into Big Town. 

"I didn't realize we were so far east." Charon says as they approach the ramshackle wall.

The Wanderer shrugs. Charon eyes him, looking for clues. 

_Did you know? Did you do it on purpose, or not know?_

No telling, unfortunately. The Wanderer is closed up as tightly as a mirelurk's ass.

They save the town, do the doc's job for her, yadda yadda.

Charon snorts loudly when the doctor charges them with nary a discount, concrete dust from the supermutants' base on her face and a dead hulk lying a few feet away, Charon's shotgun still hot from the fight. The Wanderer elbows him, but catches his eye and shares a wry smile. 

They nab a few of the cots placed along the gate for the night and set off in the morning without a backward glance, heading west again and south.

The Wanderer is visibly intrigued by the idea of a settlement compose of solely children. Charon is both skeptical of it and hoping that there's no such thing. A town full of people testifying to its existence isn't encouraging. 

It's nice to see the Wanderer interested in something, though.

*

The cave and the few structures around the entrance come into view, and the Wanderer promptly walks past them.

Charon stops.

"Uh? Boss?"

The Wanderer looks back, and Charon jerks thumb over his shoulder at their, quite literally, flashing destination. The old christmas lights wink dully in the hazy, post-war sunlight. 

He glances at the cave entrance and shrugs. "We'll come back to it," he calls, and starts forward again. 

Supermutants are thick on the ground over the ridge in startling numbers, and they only increase as they climb the next hill. 

"Reloading!" Charon drops behind cover, and the Wanderer leaps up to take his place. The familiar motions make his blood pump. Crouched behind something sturdy with the Wanderer, jostling each other as they trade off, kicking the Wanderer's emptied clips away from their feet--this, Charon relishes. This is something he hadn't hoped for, for himself.

Pre-war books and holotapes aren't things that have featured highly in Charon's life, and while he's seen a few smoothskins come and go, he's no pre-war ghoul. Nonetheless, the pre-war ideal of 'true love' is no mystery to either him or the Wasteland.

It's just not the same, exactly. In the Wasteland, what you want is that one person that _fits_ you, be they family, lover, friend, or whatever else. The partner that helps you stave off hypothermia during cold nights, who carries the food while you carry the water and guards your six in a firefight--that is the most treasured and desired relationship of post-Great War life. What you defend with your life, because that's what they do for you.

Emerging from cover at the Wanderer's cry of 'All clear!', Charon realizes with a jolt to his gut that that _is_ what they've got, what the Wanderer, employer or no, has become for him, and it's in the same moment that the Wanderer stumbles.

Three steps later he falls.

Charon, flush with epiphany, panics a little. A bellowing supermutant appears yards away, bracing a battered minigun against its hip. Charon falls into a crouch over the Wanderer's body, one foot on either side of him as he fires on it. He doesn't usually bother with fancy trick shots--better to leave that mess to the kid--but now he aims for head and neck, trying to finish this quickly so he can drag the kid off and figure out what's wrong with him. 

The Wanderer's Pip-Boy is shrieking some alarm or another, but it wails about so many things Charon can't place that particular squeal. It sounds rather urgent, and attacks his already incised nerves. 

Charon fervently hopes the damn thing doesn't call more supermutants down on them.

The mutant goes down without doing more than tearing part of his sleeve with a glancing shot, and Charon hurriedly throws his shotgun over his shoulder and hooks the Wanderer by the armpits, making for a depression near the top of the hill with a nice, solid rock overhang, a wonderfully defensible position.

The Pip-Boy gets even louder, virtually rattling the Wanderer's arm, and Charon finally looks at it. He's never seen radiation levels that high.

"God-fucking-damn it!"

Shit, he hadn't even noticed it.

He throws the Wanderer onto his back on top of the shotgun, praying he'd remembered to engage the safety and bolting back the way they'd come.

Supermutants scream behind them, and Charon thinks he actually barrels past one rushing to join the fight, but he doesn't stop to look. The Pip-Boy's alarm calms as he runs, and he can barely make out the sound of the Wanderer breathing shallowly in his ear over his stomping footfalls.

"Hang on, kid," he says with a note of pleading.

*

The Little Lamplighters refuse to let them in.

"Fucking mungos!" says the one with the filthy mouth and the impressively well kept shotgun. Had Charon not had a quietly groaning Wanderer draped over his back, he might admire that. 

"I just want medicine. A doctor-"

"We don't have nothing for the likes of you!" sneers a girl further down the wall. 

"He'll die." Charon snarls in his deepest, ghouliest voice. "He's got severe radiation poisoning, and you little shitheads are the closest settlement I know of."

The kid with the gun and the mouth holds out a hand when the girl makes to speak again. Boss kid? So be it.

"You're sure as shit not coming in," he says with an impressive note of finality. "but we got some stuff for him you're welcome to trade for."

"That will save him?"

"Should give you enough time to get him somewhere else," says the kid, and he motions to unseen others behind the gate. "Make me a good fucking offer, mungo."

Charon parts with several guns and trinket one of the kids takes a shine to, leaving the collection in a pile at the foot of the gate. The kids throw a sack over.

"Get lost," says the girl, while a younger child blows raspberries at him from behind her. 

Charon kneels to reach into the sack, bowed forward so the Wanderer doesn't slide off. Squishy, dry-wet softness meets his fingers. 

"What the fuck is this?" He shouts, but the kids have begun to disappear behind the gate, until only Boss kid remains. 

"Feed it to him, dumbass,” he says, and leaves as Charon sputters, furious. 

He's never killed a child before. He's never wanted to, and he doesn't now. He does enjoy a little fantasy of turning every single one of those brats over his knee and beating them silly as he carries the Wanderer back to the cave's entrance.

The Wanderer makes a pained noise as he lowers him down. He looks terrible, gray in the face and breathing abnormally. Charon shushes him, drops their packs and weapons to the ground and sits next to them before easing the Wanderer's head onto one of his legs. He pulls one of the squishy things from the sack. 

It is, in fact, a shish-kabob of squishy things.

"What the fuck is this?" He says conversationally, trying to settle the rancid fear in his stomach. "Ah, fuck, kid, there's nothing else for it. Eat up, c'mon."

The Wanderer flinches when the wooden skewer touches his mouth, but Charon steadies his head and makes more shushing sounds.

"I'd reassure you about the smell at least, but you know my sense of smell is for shit. You gotta eat it, kid."

The Wanderer's eyes are only barely open, glittering slits. Charon gently takes his jaw and opens his mouth.

"Please, kid." Charon says, and breathes out when the Wanderer finally takes a grudging bite.

He nearly gags it up a few times, obviously nauseated, but eventually the first shish-kabob has been eaten and Charon hesitantly holds out another.

"Do I give you all of them?" He wonders, glancing back into the cave. Hell if he's going back in there to talk to those brats again.

"Do I look like I know?" The Wanderer says, voice gusty and exhausted. He still looks sick, but color is returning to his cheeks.

Charon laughs, exuberant. "You look like shit." He says.

"Fuck you," whines the kid. He peeks up at him. "You actually look halfway decent for a zombie, at the moment."

Charon grins. "Considering the radiation bath we just had? I am a fucking daisy in bloom right now."

The Wanderer snorts, closing his eyes again. He smiles. 

"I am gonna need a doctor," he says slowly, long moments later when Charon has begun to contemplate making camp early. "I feel awful."

Charon pats him companionably. "We'll get you there."

They set off for Megaton shortly after, there being no significantly closer settlements that they both knew and trusted. The Wanderer tries to walk and makes it less than a mile before Charon is basically carrying him again.

"Do you feel like your arm is going to come off yet?" He says, referring to the limb draped over his shoulders.

"Man, I feel like my _head_ is going to come off."

"This is ridiculous. You're going on my back."

"I don't wanna go on your back!"

The Wanderer's protests are weak, and Charon can tell he's whining mostly just for the sake of whining. He lets him ramble on uninterrupted while he adjusts their things, securing both packs to the Wanderer's back and rigging his shotgun so it will hang against his tailbone. 

"Here," Charon says, handing the Wanderer his rifle. "Try to not fire it close to my ear." 

The Wanderer looks skeptical. "Uh. I'll try."

Charon has to do most of the hoisting. The Wanderer tries to climb as best as he can, but hell, the kid really is sick. Charon gives him another half a shish-kabob to munch on as he walks. 

The combined weight of the Wandered and their possessions is not inconsiderable. Charon grunts with the first step and has to stop after the fifth to hike the Wanderer up, shift his grip further up his legs, but he's still running on the buzz from Radiation Hilltop.

Hours later, the left side of Charon's head is numb and ringing from the Wanderer dispatching a crazed robot, but he's still walking. 

The Wanderer whistles.

"Damn, Charon. How long do you think you can go?"

"Not sure." Charon says, short. "Have to see."

He pretty much gets them there. Oh, they stop to stow some of the things the Wanderer had kept only to sell in a dented old refrigerator. The Wanderer marks the location in his Pip-Boy, and demands they stop for the night.

"You're going to die, man." He teases.

Charon wants to argue, he does. He's too busy chugging water.

The Wanderer grins and shakes his head.

His energy has risen in the few days since his near miss. He walks when he's able, usually for an hour or two in the mornings when they first set off. He's still off his game, too weak by half, and his lack of interest in food needles. It's not the like the kid was eating well before.

Aim’s still spectacular, however.

He talks the Wanderer out of conserving their few bottles of clean water, and forces more shish-kabobs into him. He won't accept any other kind of food.

The sack's supply is dwindling, but Megaton isn't far by now. Charon will only let himself worry if the kid throws up again.

"I'm fine," Charon insists, water running off his chin, and clears his throat.

"After carrying a squishy vault-dweller around for two days?" the Wanderer says, poking at his Pip-Boy. Three-Dog's voice comes from that direction, though Charon can't make out the words. 

He grunts, smirking at his own expense at the irony. Muscle is heavier than fat, after all. 

The Wanderer takes first watch, though Charon sleeps so lightly he might as well have stayed up. A selection of Three-Dog's two dozen songs accent his dreams, along with cheery button noises and the Wanderer's mumbling. 

Charon wakes as if he'd never slept when the Wanderer gasps. Maybe he hadn't actually.

"What?" He says, voice sleep rough. 

The Wanderer is staring at his Pip-Boy, face gone soft and young like Charon has seem less than a handful of times.

"It's--" The Wanderer says, and looks up, looks south. "--101."

"What?" Charon says again, sitting up. 

"Vault 101. It's--" The Wanderer cranks the volume up, the motion jerky and agitated. "Amata."

Charon doesn’t know that that means, but the woman’s voice is a clue. They listen to the broadcast in silence. The Wanderer clicks the radio off when the fourth repetition begins.

"Those assholes," he says, a strange mixture of anger, exasperation and homesickness. 

Charon grunts, not altogether sure what to say. 

"I'm gonna go," The Wanderer says, answering the question Charon didn't ask. "I mean, I still need that doctor," he gestures ruefully to his haggard face, his slumped posture. "But…"

Charon waits.

He doesn't know terribly much about the Wanderer's first days in the Wasteland, and less about his life before that. As often as he revealed shocking ignorance, the Wanderer gave evidence of a structured and thorough education. He knew pre-war history, geography, and various sciences, recognized technology that baffled others, and still hadn't quite learned to fear the Wasteland. 

Charon had always thought that fear was what kept people alive in the Wasteland, but the Wanderer proved that respect, perhaps, was more apt, for despite all his teasing, he had successfully sold himself as a Wasteland wanderer in Underworld. An uncommon one to be sure, uncannily effective, but Charon hadn't thought to connect him to Three-Dog's fanciful reports of a tide-turning vault-dweller. He had learned quickly how to survive in the world as it had come to be--better, in fact, than most.

He was a natural, basically.

Charon hadn't even known which vault the kid had sprung from until his father came onto the scene in his worn jumpsuit, the back proudly proclaiming '101'.

"But," the Wanderer says again, more quietly, knuckling his hands. "I can't leave them."

*

Charon practically has to strap him down to make him stay a night in Megaton.

He's fresh from a grumbling Doc Church's care and all but glowing with the shroud of radiation poisoning lifted from him, but still skinny as hell and _recovering_ , damn it all.

"They've gone this long without you around, Miracle Boy," Charon says, driving the Wanderer up the stairs of his home. 

"Not very well, apparently," the Wanderer says.

"They'll keep for a few more hours," Charon says firmly. "Go to _sleep_ , for fuck's sake, before I kill you myself."

The Wanderer goes, grumbling, and is snoring loudly within minutes. Charon shares an exasperated look with the robot.

In the morning: "What the hell do you mean, _wait here_?"

The Wanderer shrinks a little, but doesn't yield. "I mean, wait here. You'd be a little--shocking--to them."

"Like I give a shit," Charon growls. 

"If the situation is already delicate--"

"One ghoul ain't gonna bring the roof down on everyone," Charon says, ignoring the Wanderer's flinch, uncertain what soft spot he'd hit. He eases off a little though, dialing down his loom. "I doubt they'll notice me."

The Wanderer is dubious. "You're like, six and half feet tall." He says.

Charon shrugs. "People don't tend to see me standing behind you."

"Okay, Tenpenny Tower was weird, I'll admit--"

Charon refuses to budge, and doggedly follows him from the city, the Wanderer continuing to insist he remain behind all the way to the Vault. Charon folds his arms and stands back as the Wanderer punches keys, still grumbling. 

The alarms make him jump. The Wanderer comes to stand by him, and they watch the enormous door roll away.

Immediately inside, the Wanderer casts him an amused look as he replaces the door.

"Didn't I tell you to stay behind?" he says.

Charon snorts. 

The Wanderer is laughing as he turns around, and stops as he takes in the entryway.

There is trash and debris littered about, doors left hanging open, and a body left apparently to rot. Charon shoots two radroaches while the Wanderer moves from room to room in a horrified daze.

At the stairwell to the next level, he stands before the door as if afraid to advance.

Charon thinks about touching his shoulder, pressing him forward, but instead pushes the door open for him.

*

Amata closes the door behind them with so little sentimentality, Charon is surprised it doesn’t roll shut on his ass.

He’s somewhat stunned. “That was...”

The Wanderer shrugs. “Home.”

Charon catches him with a hand pressed flat to the chest. “Hold up. What just happened--you’re okay with that?”

The Wanderer shrugs again, jerkily. “No, not really, but Amata is right. She can’t start calming things down while I’m running around, pissing people off with my mere presence,” he says with a bitter edge. 

“Christ.” Charon says, thinking of all the sneering faces, the threats, the jeers...

“Yeah.” 

“Not even a stimpack for our trouble."

"At least she thanked us," says the Wanderer, sighing as they come out of the cave. He turns his face up.

Charon watches him, and then shakes his head because he knows how sincerely the kid means it.

"Don't you get tired of all this?" he says, shotgun bumping on his back as he swings to face him. "Helping people who don't give a shit?"

The Wanderer heaves a tired sigh and shrugs for a third time.

* 

Paradise Falls, well, falls. 

The kid pays to get in after a lengthy debate with Charon over whether it would be better to just go after one of the guardsman's people. 

Two hours later they share a corner, guarding each other's flank as armored, well-armed slavers rush down on them. A small slug bounces off the plate covering Charon's right shoulder, and he grunts as his arm goes numb and tingling.

"Why do you get us into this stuff…" He gruffs, letting off a shot.

"I waited until some of them went to sleep, didn't I?" 

" _Three_ of them. Three of them went to sleep."

The Wanderer only smiles an adrenaline grin, showing teeth.

The slaver with the minigun necessitates some trick shooting on the Wanderer's part while Charon keeps as low to the ground as he can. Bullets tear through the bar in little sprays of splinters and metal slivers--until the Wanderer hisses a triumphant " _Yess._ "

Charon rolls to his feet and fires a shot at another slaver's midsection. A few feet away, a figure is slumped over the bulk of the dropped minigun. 

When all of the slavers are dead, the Wanderer says they're going to rest for a night before moving on.

"We're so close," says the Wanderer. "I don't want to stop now."

Since emerging from the Vault the kid has had a fire lit under his ass about the G.E.C.K. They’d book it back to Little Lamplight, then east across the Wasteland _again_ for the infamous slaver den. 

"I'm getting dizzy." Charon announces. "Pick a direction for chrissakes."

Charon doesn't like it. It feels like they're coming to the edge of something, rushing up on it. 

An end, maybe, but Charon doesn't want to think like that. It makes what skin he has left prickle.

Sometimes he closes his eyes and sees the Wanderer falling again, and for a second he's back on the hilltop, and he doesn't know what's wrong, doesn't know if he can fix it, doesn't know if his partner's alive, and again, he panics.

The Wanderer drives them hard. They're running through their water stores too quickly, eating meals as they move, no time to tease or screw around. Whoever draws the lucky straw each night immediately sacks out, and they barely go out of their way to resupply, let alone harass the local troublemakers. 

"I kind of miss picking off raiders," Charon admits one night, as he wakes the Wanderer for his watch.

The Wanderer wiggles free of the bedroll, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he stretches. "I know what you mean. Remember that school near Megaton? The one we passed up?"

Charon smiles, closing his eyes, hands behind his head. The blankets are still warm from the Wanderer. "Yeah. Springvale. Wanna pay them a visit?"

The stars are visible through the haze, this far out in the Wasteland. The Wanderer is looking up, Charon can tell by the direction his voice comes from as he says, almost dreamily, "Yeah. When all of this is over."

*

Vault 87 was not the worst Charon has seen while traveling with the Wanderer. Once inside, the radiation levels weren't even high enough to give him a buzz, and the supermutants were downright puny compared to some of their topside brethren. The laboratories were chilling, but they always are. After all they went through getting there, it was kind of a letdown. 

It features heavily in Charon's nightmares all the same, intrudes on his quiet moments. The sound of the Wanderer's startled scream as he went down, as they both did--and waking up to nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing to shoot, nothing to follow, no clues as to where to go. Locked doors, and no Wanderer to scourge up passcodes and employee badges like Charon always teased him for. A few spots of blood, but not enough to tell him if the Wanderer was alive or dead.

Charon had paced helplessly around that dead end room for hours, the loss dawning on him in stages. 

He'd had to stumble back through the Vault, back to Little Lamplight, following the trail of corpses because the Wanderer always leads, and he only follows, and he doesn't remember the way. 

The long walk back the Underworld, because he doesn't know where else to go, is awful.

Willow is surprised to see him. 

Alone. She’s surprised to see him, alone.

"Where's the smoothskin?" she says.

Charon stalks past her. 

*

He is where he is every day, sitting in the back of the Ninth Circle, wishing he was the type to drown his sorrows, when the Wanderer strides into the bar much like he did that first time, nearly a year ago.

Except it's not like the first time, not at all, because the Wanderer is tired and sagging, and Charon knows him, knows how much punishment he can take in a fight before he goes down, knows how many tries it takes him to start a fire and all his little bad habits, like dropping his empty clips where he'll trip over them and shedding his goddamn armor when it gets a little hot. 

By the time he comes to a stop at the edge of Charon's table, the whole damn bar has gone quiet, the lot of them not-so-surreptitiously watching. Willow hadn't been the only one to ask after his missing smoothskin.

"Ready to come back to work?"

"Been waitin’ on you, boss."

The Wanderer gives a soft, chuffing laugh and sits heavily across from him. Charon snatches a tumbler from the next table and pushes it up against his fingers. The Wanderer looks at it wryly and swirls it around, but doesn't drink.

"So," Charon says, a little hoarse.

"So," the Wanderer says. "Raven Rock. Heard of it?"

*

"Where are we going?" Charon asks.

"The Citadel," says the Wanderer. He picks through the rubble delicately, setting an unhurried pace.

The Wanderer peers at him over his shoulder, and Charon fidgets.

It's not quite the same as before. Charon is off his game, braced for an accusation that he knows isn't coming, and the Wanderer is looking at him strangely, constant little, darting glances that don't land.

 _Why didn't you come after me?_ is what Charon imagines to be going through that head in those moments. 

_Because I didn't know where you were, how to find you, if you were alive._

It's what he told himself in Underworld, while he waited and hardened himself, resigned himself to always waiting. The Wanderer's a smart guy. He knows as much as Charon does that you can't make a trail appear where one doesn't exist. 

All true. That doesn’t make it not feel like a load of excuses.

"It wasn't so bad." The Wanderer tells him, when they stop to camp (too early). "Same ole, kind of, and the helpful robots were pretty--" he grins, "helpful. Mostly it was weird being on…my own…"

The Wanderer winces.

Charon clears his throat awkwardly. "Maybe Wadsworth could come along."

"Ugh," The Wanderer gives a startled laugh and blanches. "I think I'm still off Mr. Handys, honestly."

Charon snorts, and grins.

They move slowly along the river, the next day, the walls of the Citadel coming into view long before they reach them. Charon kicks rocks into the water, eyeing the shoreline in case any mirelurks take offense. 

He says, "What's going to happen at the Citadel, do you think?"

A few feet ahead of him, the Wanderer halts progress. "I don't know!" He says in a burst, whirling. 

"The G.E.C.K is gone, and the Enclave have had run of the Memorial for weeks, but on the other hand the President is gone, and do they even care anymore without him? Did any of them know about his plan? Who knows! Maybe they'll trash the place out of spite?" He throws his hands up. "I have no idea, Charon."

"Been thinking on that for a while, huh," Charon says, after a beat.

The Wanderer groans. "Since--fucking--Raven Rock. I have--I have no idea how this is gonna go, and I wish--"

That your dad was here, Charon thinks. He doesn't say it. The Wanderer sees him think it and shrugs helplessly. 

*

They reach the Citadel, and after that, things happen fast. Speeches, robots, sieges, and the Memorial again, after seeming ages. Later Charon remembers being surprised that James's body wasn't where he last saw it, slumped against the glass.

And then the Wanderer rushes into the chamber. Charon feels the radiation levels rising through the glass, like a tingling rush going over his body. He watches the Wanderer stand at the computer, pondering the keypad, watches him look up and turn his head to the side. 

Charon sees him say, _I am Alpha and Omega_ , and look slowly back to the pad.

 _The beginning and the end_ , he hears distantly, from inside his own head but in the Wanderer’s voice, as it was spoken softly over so many campfires.

Star-Paladin Cross swears next to him, making him jump. "He doesn't know the code either, _damn_ it!"

But he's figured it out. His elbow moves as he keys it in.

The water purifier powers up noisily. Around Charon and from the radio in his ear come the sounds of the Brotherhood throwing up cheers and hoots, while in the chamber, the Wanderer curls over the console, holding himself up with a white-knuckled grip. 

He drops to his knees, and from there to the ground.

"Why didn't I go?" Charon wonders aloud, stunned. He stares at the Wanderer's body, willing it to pick itself up. "Why--why didn't I--why didn't he ask…"

Cross manages to separate herself from the merriment enough to give him a sad smile and a clap on the shoulder that rocks him. 

*

It's a dream.

It's him reclining on the bank, shotgun across his lap, the Wanderer laid out near him with his feet in the clear, clean water. The kid's boots are off and dropped carelessly to the rocky sand next to his jacket, t-shirt scrubbed up to his armpits because Charon threw a fit when he actually started to take it off. His bared stomach is too-skinny, concave, and with a hint of rib above it, but there's muscle there too. 

Charon is a lucky ghoul. The nerves in his fingers are still healthy, still hanging onto his rotten meat, so he can feel the shiver that goes through the Wanderer's belly as he hesitantly reaches, and glides his fingertips over soft, sheltered skin. The Wanderer cracks his eyes and smiles, closes them again.

**Author's Note:**

> (Show of hands, who has Broken Steel? Not me, unfortunately.)


End file.
